Friday, September 9, 2016

New poll shows Clinton, Trump tied among Florida voters

Two months to the day before the presidential election, a poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University shows Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton tied among likely Florida voters.

Clinton and Trump both get the support of 47 percent of likely voters in a head-to-head matchup, according to the Quinnipiac poll. That is virtually unchanged from a month ago, when Clinton led Trump 46-45 — which is considered a statistical dead heat.

The two remain tied when the most prominent third-party candidates are thrown into the race, with Trump and Clinton drawing 43 percent apiece. Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, gets 8 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein was chosen by 2 percent of the people surveyed.

Those numbers are also basically the same as Quinnipiac's August poll, though Johnson has moved up a point and Stein is down one.

The Connecticut-based Quinnipiac, which frequently conducts polls in Florida and other states, surveyed 761 likely Florida voters from Aug. 29 to Wednesday. The poll has a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

The university's polling institute also released swing-state polls Thursday showing Clinton holding modest leads in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Trump has a one-point edge in Ohio that widens to four points when Johnson and Stein are added to the mix.

"The effect of the Republican and Democratic conventions on the presidential race has run its course,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the poll. "As the campaign enters its final stage, Florida and Ohio, two of the largest and most important swing states, are too close to call, while North Carolina and Pennsylvania give Hillary Clinton the narrowest of leads."

The poll continues to show Floridians divided along racial, gender and party lines in the presidential race. Clinton does marginally better among Democrats than Trump does with Republicans in a head-to-head race, while independents favor Trump, 48-39. Trump, a real-estate mogul, wins men by 22 percentage points; Clinton, a former secretary of state, takes women by 20.

The divide persists despite recent efforts by Trump to reach out to nonwhite voters, particularly African-Americans.

The picture for smaller slices of the electorate can change slightly with Johnson and Stein factored in — for example, Trump's lead among independents falls to five points — but the outlines remain largely the same.

The numbers among different subgroups have larger margins of error than those in the overall poll.